The present invention relates to a mobile communication terminal, and more particularly to a method and apparatus for searching for a directory entry in a mobile communication terminal phone book.
In recent times, with the increasing development of information communication technologies, information and communication environments have changed quickly. Particularly, mobile communication terminals (“terminals”) are now considered requisites for modern society, and are widely used throughout the world. With the increasing demands of users due to widespread use of the terminals, several functions (e.g., a voice message function, a SMS function, and a phone book function, etc.) have been added to the general voice call function terminals.
The phone book function for use in a conventional terminal will be described with reference to FIG. 1. A terminal phone book is a searchable list of directory entries, wherein each entry may have information stored in one or more of several fields. Typical fields in a terminal phone book entry are a hot key, a name, and a phone number, although additional fields may be present.
If a user selects a phone-book menu using a button on an input pad of a terminal, a display screen for searching for a directory entry is displayed as shown in FIG. 1.
The user enters a desired sub-menu from among a plurality of sub-menus (e.g., a search menu using a hot key, a search menu using a name, and a search menu using a phone number, etc.), and searches for a directory entry according to the corresponding sub-menu. Here, a hot key means a shortcut key such as a speed dial number pre-assigned to a specific directory entry.
In other words, the terminal phone book function can search for an entry using only one of the sub-menus, such that the user must manually press a button corresponding to one of the sub-menus to search for a desired phone number in the phone book. In addition, if the user fails to search for a directory entry using a single sub-menu, the user must close the sub-menu, and must visit other sub-menus by pressing or clicking other buttons corresponding to other sub-menus, resulting in greater inconvenience of the user.